Field trips are a great way to enhance the learning experience of your students, offering them hands-on opportunities to explore new environments, perspectives and concepts. However, field trips can often be stressful to put together and manage. If you’re looking to make field trips a breeze for your school, these four tips will help you stay organized, ensure all your students are safe, and create memorable experiences that stick with them for a lifetime.
Plan Ahead
The more you plan in advance, the smoother the day will go. Once you have a destination in mind that aligns with your current curriculum, you can begin covering all the other logistics, including transportation, reservations, permission slips, meals, and any other information and planning needed for your specific trip. The more thoroughly you plan the trip, the smaller the chance that an unpleasant surprise will arise.
Set Expectations Early
Setting clear expectations for your students ahead of time is an imperative step to helping your field trip go without a hitch. Remind students of the rules and expectations regarding their behavior, what they need to bring on field trip day, and the learning objectives for the trip.
Ensuring that your students know what is expected of them before the trip will help things to flow better while building excitement for the upcoming chance to take their learning outside the walls of their daily classroom.
Properly Prepare Your Chaperones
Chaperones play a key part in a smooth field trip, helping ensure everybody has a safe, secure, and fun learning experience. Make sure there are enough adults to supervise the number of students attending the field trip. The lower student-to-chaperone ratio, the better, as lower numbers allow each chaperone to give more of their attention to their group of students.
To ensure your chaperones are properly prepared for the trip, take the time to get them up to speed on any information and expectations they need to know. Develop an emergency plan and share it with them beforehand to ensure that they are prepared in case they face any bumps in the road. Work to provide them with information they may need about their assigned students and the field trip location. The right chaperones and chaperone preparation will help yield an A+ field trip experience for everyone!
Digitize Your Field Trip Payments
Parents are busy, which makes it easy to forget to send their kids with field trip cash. Even if they remember, there’s no guarantee that kids won’t lose the money on route. By switching to digital field trip payments, schools can make collecting funds for their field trips a breeze. Many parents will appreciate the ease of paying online, and your school will be able to automate the tracking of funds for the trip!
Are you ready to digitize your field trip payments? Whether collecting bus fees, renting out the district swimming pool, or taking payment for field trips, EFS can be a great tool for your facilities and transportation departments. Our online, onsite and mobile platforms provide a much-desired enhanced experience regardless of payment preference, while dynamic reports offer a real-time review, so no one is accidentally excluded or penalized because of last-minute payments.
